IRAQ RIGHT AND LEFT: USE CHEMICAL WEAPONS NOW, REBUILD LATER

Znet carries the story by Stephen Kerr on Rumsfeld’s plan to circumvent and subvert the Chemical Weapons Convention to allow “crowd control” during the upcoming Iraq War by using the very WMD that are allegedly causing the war in the first place. Excerpt:

On Wednesday February 5th while testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld revealed just how the Pentagon plans to deal with a hostile and armed Iraqi population, of “between one and seven million civilians with semi-automatic rifles, rocket launchers and other military weapons….The United States military has been busy transforming powerful synthetic opiates such as Fentanyl into an aerosol chemical weapon that knocks troublesome civilians unconscious…a chemical weapon similar to that which killed 20% of those who were exposed to it at the Palace of Culture Theatre in Moscow .

Nicholas Penniman argues in TomPaine.com that for strategic and humanitarian reasons the left must start now to dominate the dialogue on rebuilding Iraq after the war. Excerpt:

[We should be] saying that $100 million in humanitarian aid to post-war Iraq is not enough…[We need] to focus [debate] on improving the social conditions in Iraq, promoting true democracy, blocking foreign monopolization of the oil, bolstering health care and education, and establishing media… The rebuilding will be high-profile and expensive. If done right, it won’t be another Kuwait or Afghanistan. It will be a victory for the great tradition of liberalism, a beginning of a democratized Middle East, and a scrubbing of America’s tarnished integrity. If left solely to the corporations and the hawks, it will likely be just another black mark on our history — another conservative attempt to provide a “superior moral justification for selfishness.”